When Caroline first heard about plans to write ”Back Rooms,” she wanted very much to be involved and tell her story. ”I want other women to know how terrible an illegal abortion can be.” Caroline, 44, is a librarian at a college in a small rural Massachusetts town. As she talks, she is frequently overcome with tears.
For a long time I think I drank to avoid the feelings. And it wasn`t until quite recently that I went through a whole period of really re-living the terror of this experience.
When it happened I knew right away that I was pregnant. It was in the summer, between my junior and senior years of college. (She was taking summer classes in Cleveland.) I remember walking over to the Cleveland Museum of Art the very next day, to the park around the lagoon, and sitting with the young artist involved.
It was the first and only time that I was ever sexually intimate with this man. I wasn`t particularly physically attracted to him, but he had always pressed. So I gave in. At the time I hadn`t done anything about birth control for myself.
I really didn`t know what to do. I knew, though, that having a baby would ruin my whole life. The man involved felt responsible and wanted to marry me, and he attempted to persuade me. I didn`t want to marry him-I thought it was a very weak reason for getting married. He offered me a ring. He had just taken a teaching job, and he wanted me to live with him in Columbus and have the baby.
But I did not want to do that. I really did not know what to do. I spent a lot of time just seeing my life in a shambles. I thought about going to a home for unwed mothers, and I thought about how my family would deal with it, how it would affect my college career, my scholarships, my job. How could I go away and then come back and pick up the pieces?
Things at that time in Cleveland were very tight. It was 1963, and when I followed up on the few leads (for an abortion) there were, it seemed that it was absolutely the worst possible time in about five years to have an abortion in Cleveland. (There had been a series of police raids.) The police were following up on everything.
I finally located an abortionist in Youngstown, Ohio. It was going to cost $100. I contacted the artist in Columbus, who was very angry that I was taking this step. With great reluctance, he gave me the money.
I don`t know what happened to the people who had been my friends. I really isolated myself in this. I had not talked to them. I did confide in a social worker I had made friends with during this crisis. I also became friendly with a younger couple, and the four of us made this trip to Youngstown, about an hour and a half away, to get my abortion. I was about 12 weeks pregnant.
This so-called doctor had two businesses. He was a bookie and he was an abortionist. He was an elderly man in a ramshackle little house in a disreputable, shabby section of Youngstown.
He had a room with a chair and stirrups set up. It was all very, very secretive. The money had to be in cash, in certain denominations, and it had to be given to him in an envelope. He checked it to make sure it wasn`t marked. He was very concerned about keeping the cops out of his operation. But I took the risk of turning my life over to him because I didn`t think I had another choice.
The social worker had come with me, and the couple waited at the motel. The ”doctor” also insisted that you had to be married. His scruples were such that he would do this only for married women. So I pretended to be married to the social worker.
He explained that he was doing a saline injection and that there should be some cramping and the abortion would happen within 24 hours. We went back to the motel. We waited through the night and nothing happened. So we drove back to Cleveland.
I don`t know how many days passed. But I do know that when I finally aborted, I was alone in my room in the dormitory at school. I went through at least 12 hours of labor alone in my room.
It was more terrible than I imagined (it would be), partly because I was alone, partly because I was scared. Somehow I thought (that once the fetus was aborted), then it would be over, but it wasn`t over. I kept hemorrhaging and it just wouldn`t stop.
I remember going home for Thanksgiving and wondering whether I`d have the strength to take the bus. While I was home my mother kept saying, ”I think you`re anemic.” And I remember feeling very drained.
Early in December, I became friendly with a very gentle, brilliant but quite crazy college student. I remember going to a fraternity Christmas dance with him, going to the beauty shop to get my hair done, which is what you did in those days when you went to a fancy college formal dance. I was hardly able to walk home from the beauty shop to the dormitory.
That night I found myself confiding in him that I couldn`t dance because I was so weak. I`d had this abortion, and I was still bleeding, and I didn`t know what was wrong. He said he would see what he could do.
He came to see me the very next afternoon. He`d gone to his church and afterward talked to the rector. And the rector, to whom I shall be forever grateful, was very wise and humane and kind. He asked my friend to bring me to him.
The rector thought I needed medical attention, and he was going to do something about it. Now I was terrifed of this, because I didn`t want my parents to find out, and I didn`t want to be arrested. So he called one of the doctors in his congregation and made an appointment for me that afternoon.
When I saw the doctor, I got really frightened. He immediately made arrangements to get me admitted to the hospital. He said they would have to do some tranfusions because I had lost so much blood. They gave me about 5 pints of blood.
Later they did a D&C (dilatation and curettage). I wasn`t yet 21, so they couldn`t do it without my parents` permission. The doctor called my mother and said that I had been having some menstrual problems, and there was nothing to be concerned about; the D&C was just a routine procedure and would help. He said that I was quite anemic. My mother gave her permission and never knew that I`d had an abortion. She said afterward that she always thought I was anemic.
I must have been in the hospital five days. The church paid my hospital bill, and the doctor never charged me. I was very thankful and totally done in.
I really was desperate. If I had not been so desperate, I wouldn`t have opted for the Youngstown, Ohio, connection. I certainly wouldn`t want anyone to have to live through the experience that I lived through. There`s no need for it. I did make choices: I considered and chose not to choose marriage. I chose not to be an unwed mother. Abortion was the option of last resort, but I chose it because it seemed the only option that would allow me to go on with my life, even at the risk of losing it.
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Wilfredo`s wife suggested that he would have a unique point of view. Although he doubts that his stories will be ”anything unusual,” he has agreed to be interviewed. Wilfredo grew up in the Puerto Rican ghetto of New York City in the `60s. He is a wiry, intense, dark-haired man in his 30s.
Well, it was supposed to be a seance, and I used to go because I knew the family, and my mother used to go, so she would drag me along. They`d have like good seances and bad seances, where you`d go to a good spiritualist and whatever she did was for the good, and then there was the bad spiritualist, so if you wanted to get back at somebody or do something evil, you`d go to this one. I didn`t believe in it too much.
They would combine an abortion with the seance, in conjunction with spiritualism. I remember one time they had candles lit, and it was just like a regular seance, like they were praying to God.
They would make the person appear to be very comfortable, I don`t know how, with all those candles and chants, maybe like hypnotizing her. They were chanting, and they would have incense burning, and they would do a real big number, calling in the spirits to help and to make sure that everything went right: using black magic to do good, so to speak. They did induce a trance in the person. I was around to see that, but I didn`t stick around to see the rest because they were going to perform it there and . . . uh . . . the method was lye in a douche bag, and they had some long implement. I knew that the lye they were using was for cleaning drains. I knew that had to be harmful. They said it would induce abortion. Of course, something like that would induce an abortion-but what else would it do?
The girl had to hang out there for a couple of days before they (would)
let her go home. They thought everything was fine and it was all over with, but the woman ended up going to the hospital afterward because she got burned inside from the lye.
This was in Manhattan, 13th Street and Avenue B, in that general area. It`s easy to find the underground when you live in the ghetto. In some places they did have underground doctors, I remember, and those were where most of the women wanted to go because they felt safer.
Oh! . . . I remember another girl! She was my girlfriend! She was my first love. Yes, Rosa. I was somewhere around 14 or 15. She was about the same age.
Rosa . . . Rosa and I were together for several years when we were kids. We slept together, at my mom`s or at her mom`s, and they accepted that. They didn`t care-they figured it was the best thing-but she got pregnant.
She had something done to her, and after it was done, nothing happened. They had said everything was fine and she should wait a few days. Two days later she came over to my house and said, ”Wilfredo, take me to the hospital!” She was bleeding. And sure enough the hospital said she was having a miscarriage.
She didn`t tell me until we were on they way to the hospital that it was due to the fact that she had that illegal abortion and they told her to wait a few days and not to worry. How crazy! Wait a couple days.
Rosa never got pregnant from me after that, for all the years we were together. She always wanted to have a baby, ever since she was a kid, so she would be a mother, she would be accepted, so she would be worth something. Yes, Rosa had that too. I remember.
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Jacqueline is a grandmother who looks younger than her nearly 60 years. Now divorced, she is a full-time college teacher. She speaks precisely in a modulated voice, but in contrast to her quiet manner, you sense an underlying toughness.
I never knew anyone who had an abortion. None of my friends. No one had ever talked to me about it. If I knew about it, it was from hearing horror tales or from novels. I had never heard of anything like what happened to me. In the `40s I went to a small women`s college in Boston. My friend Irene was attending a special series for the students and heard a woman doctor, a gynecologist, speak on birth control. When I think back on it, it was really pretty remarkable that this was sponsored by a college for single women in the `40s.
I had been from a very conservative small town and was a virgin and had strong convictions about maintaining my virginity until I was married.
Later I roomed with Irene. It was such a small, tiny apartment. We had bunk beds, one dresser, a small closet, a teensy little kitchen and a living room. But it was on the back side of Beacon Hill in Boston, and we had a fireplace. This tiny little place had a style and a charm and a location. So here we lived, and she was going with Jim, and they were obviously having a sexual relationship.
I met a guy who was interning at one of the hospitals in the city. Dick and I had an immediate physical attraction. Anyway, Dick and I, eventually, although I resisted for a while . . . started having an affair. (I was about 21 at this time.) I cried the first time, at the enormity of what I could experience.
But I became aware that there were a lot of women in his life, that there had been and maybe were others now. He acknowledged that he was not emotionally involved with me. We had been having this very passionate, very exciting sexual relationship, and it was so disappointing not to have love. I felt rejected. I wanted him to love me.
During this time I was taking an evening class at Harvard, and a guy began sitting next to me.
He was making overtures, and I was really very ambivalent about it. I guess what really appealed to me was his interest. One day we went up to my apartment. After my saying no for hours, he was ready to leave, and all of a sudden something in me encouraged him to stay. We had sex, and suddenly I realized that all the time that Dick and I were having a relationship he used condoms. This guy didn`t have . . . I had no protection. So we had this one episode and I became pregnant.
My first reaction was really suicidal. I couldn`t think of anything else to do, commit suicide or have an abortion.
When I talked with Irene about it, she told me (about) the lecture on birth control by a woman doctor, and she thought that this woman was aware of where abortions could be performed.
At that time they did the frog test. It was positive and only confirmed what I already knew. I went back to the doctor to ask her if she could perform an abortion or knew how I could get one. She asked me if there wasn`t some way that I could live with this. She didn`t know I was considering not living. Wasn`t there some way that I could go through with it? I said, ”No way.” She said, ”Your family?” and I said, ”No way.”
When my mother and father were divorced, I was to go with my mother, but my father had not sent her the support payments he was supposed to, so she sent me back to him. I grew up with my father and my stepmother. I never remember my father putting his arms around me or holding me on his lap or doing anything affectionate. My stepmother was very strict. I grew up in this very cold atmosphere, not supportive, not loving. There was no way I could go back to them and say, ”I failed. I`m pregnant. Help me.” In fact I had left home and gone into nursing only to get away. It was a way to escape and be independent.
So here I was, sitting in this office, saying the only thing for me was an abortion. She finally conceded that maybe she could refer me to someone who would help me, but would not tell me this person`s name. She took out the telephone book and took her letter opener and drew it down the page to this line, and said, ”Here, read this.”
The man was a urologist and I think he had lost his license. He lived in an older, respectable but shabby neighborhood in which he had this large apartment. As far as I could figure out, there wasn`t anyone else there when I was. On the first visit he told me how much it would cost: $100. He made it clear that if there were any complications, he would disavow any connection with me.
That $100 was a lot of money to me at the time, considering what my income was. So I told Dick that I was pregnant. He`d been very careful, of course, but assumed he was responsible. He said, ”What are we going to have, a shotgun marriage?” I said no, I was going to have an abortion, so he volunteered to pay for it and I accepted.
On the first visit to this doctor, he inserted a catheter. He said that very often this initiated some contractions and made it easier to do an abortion. Sometimes that was all that was necessary, but it didn`t work. So I had to go back again.
Irene`s boyfriend Jim decided that I shouldn`t go alone. So Jim went with me. He waited in the living room. I remember going into this room in this apartment, and there was a table and stirrups. The thing that bothered me was the way he sterilized the instruments. He had this big basin of disinfectant. I remember the pain. It wasn`t sharp, just a kind of deep cramping agony. I recovered physically.
I think I had the abortion in May, and that summer I realized what a depression I was in. It was the most awful, unpleasant experience I`ve ever had. I`ve never been as depressed since. It was this awful, flat feeling. I began to wonder if I was ever coming out of it.
When I first found out I was pregnant it was spring, and I can remember leaning on the window sill, spending a long day looking out the window, feeling desperate. I think that I cried off and on that day, leaning against that windowsill. I never knew another woman who had an abortion in those years. I felt that there was no one to turn to. Only in the past 10 years did I know any other women who acknowledged they had had an abortion. My generation just did not talk about it.
